Guy Walters is the author of nine books, which include four wartime thrillers and the critically acclaimed histories Hunting Evil and Berlin Games. Frustrated at the enormous amount of junk history around, Guy sees it as his personal mission to wage war on ignorance and misconceptions about the past. Guy is currently working on a new history of the Great Escape, and is also studying for his PhD at Newcastle University. His website is www.guywalters.com and is @guywalters on Twitter.

Why are we still obsessed with the Third Reich?

It's long been a truism of publishing that putting a swastika on the front of a book will guarantee healthy sales. (Yes, yes, or indeed a healthy readership for a blog post.) I have direct experience of this, as most of the books I write feature swastikas, or eagles, or similar pieces of Third Reich iconography. Unsurprisingly, I'll therefore be tuning in to Radio 4 at 11.30 this morning, which is broadcasting a documentary called Nazi Gold on the publishing industry's Third Reich fetish. (Ironically enough, at the time of writing, a piece about the programme is the third-most read story on the BBC news website.)

As one of the interviewees for the programme, I was asked why the publishing industry, and indeed why such a large segment of the (male) population, maintains this interest in a murderous regime that extinguished millions of lives. It's a question I tried to answer nearly nine years ago, in a piece I wrote for The Spectatorshortly after I published my first book (which was about Nazis).

I concluded then that the fetish arises from 'the human attraction towards evil'. "The Devil not only gets the best tunes," I wrote, "but, in the case of the Nazis, the best costumes, the best generals, the best weapons, the best iconography and even the most powerful-sounding language. From Göttermorgen to Götterdämmerung, it is the blackest story ever told, and it's still being told everywhere."

I'm not sure that after nearly a decade of immersing myself in the Third Reich that I can come up with much better than that. We, like many other cultures, do tend to glamourise evil and violence – read David Wilson in today's Daily Mail about TV's love affair with serial killers – and there is no doubt that this often lurid obsession with Nazis is part of that malaise.

There is also, I tentatively suggest, a greater or lesser part in some Englishmen – such as the late Alan Clark – that finds authoritarianism and fascism appealing. One regularly hears, from quite sensible people, the assertion that at least the Nazis 'got things done', which, to be charitable to such people, shows an ignorance of the huge inefficiencies and bureaucratic wastefulness in the way the Third Reich was run. When this admiration is left unchecked, such people mutate into the repellent likes of David Irving.

On a personal level, I'm aware that by writing about the Third Reich I can be accused of promoting this obsession. However, I like to think that what I produce is sober and thoughtful enough to not be accused of glamourising Nazism. Barely a week passes in which I do not learn of some element of the Third Reich that disgusts me, and if my books – festooned with swastikas as they are – succeed in transmitting my moral outrage, then so much the better.